9 Reasons Why Our Paid Search Ads Don’t Appear As Expected

Ever wondered why our paid search ads don’t show up as expected? There are occasions that we don’t need our ads to show up on search results or partner pages. That’s because we want our ads will only be exposed (and clicked) by people whom we think are our target audience. For example, they may only be residents of a certain city or country, they may only be online from 9am to 4pm or their browser language should only be in Simplified Chinese. Paid search programs now allow advertisers to be very specific about their ads. While this could be among the reasons why ads don’t show up on search results, they’re not the only ones.

Lack of funds
If our campaign does not have sufficient funds to start, ads will not be displayed.

2 Campaign is paused
Campaigns or ad groups must be activated before ads can show up. By default it’s not this case so check your campaign and make sure it’s changed from Paused to Active.

3 No daily budget set
By default, daily budget is set at 0 dollars. A dedicated budget above this value should be set before ads can start appearing.

4 Billing issues
If credit card, billing address and other billing issues aren’t sorted first, AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing can’t activate the ads. They make sure you can pay for every click made in your campaign.

5 Daily budget reached
Ads don’t appear for the day when daily budget is reached. This is a safeguard to ensure you don’t overspend on your campaigns on a daily basis.

6 Ads have been disapproved
Ads that don’t follow guidelines (selling prohibited products, for example) they won’t be shown.

7 Keywords have been disapproved
Keywords that don’t adhere to guidelines (drugs or guns, for example) will not trigger ads to be displayed.

8 Ad position preferences
If you set your ad to display only when it is at a certain position, it will only display ads if it is ranked according to your ad position preference. Otherwise, it won’t, even if it matches other criteria.

9 Lack of patience
Even if paid search yields much faster results than SEO, it may also take a few days before approval of ads/keywords. Therefore advertisers are asked for patience and wait for up to five days before lodging a complaint on why ads don’t appear as expected.